Simulation of thermal conduction and residual stress formulation upon a welded structure

Abstract

So far, welding has long been proved its diverse application in a large number of industries and manufactures. As versatile as welding can be, there have been a wide range of papers nationally and internationally published in scientific journals which granted an insight into various aspects of the welding procedure. Moreover, thanks to the advancement of computer softwares over the last couple decades, approaches and processes of carrying out welding simulation to determine weld temperature as well as post–welding residual stress have been publicly announced via a plethora of scientific papers on journals with high credibility. By excelling in the simulation, it is feasible to predict and modify welding parameters, for example heat source and material properties, before practical implementation, or even suggest proper post-weld heat treatment which is commonly utilized to eliminate structural defects after welding process is finished. Nonetheless, it is a plain truth that those papers whose scope were just limited to perform the inspection of temperature and residual stress. How significant those related results will impact the welded structure when it is put under operating conditions was hardly predicted and evaluated. That is the main objective of this paper. In this paper, a welding process taking place on a thin-walled vessel which was previously introduced in a published paper shall be re-simulated to validate the appropriateness of input data. Then, the structure is to be cooled until its temperature roughly equal to that of ambient one. After that, the welding results, namely post-welding temperature and residual stress, shall be imported into the strength testing simulation of the surveyed structure. Overall, with the equivalent stress accounting for 78% of the material’s yield stress in the strength testing problem, the thin-walled vessel is still guaranteed for normal operation.